[HN Gopher] Launch HN: FirstIgnite (YC S21) - Matching scientist...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: FirstIgnite (YC S21) - Matching scientists with relevant
businesses
Hi, HN! I'm Cody Pawlowski and my co-founder is Chase Bonhag and
we're FirstIgnite (https://firstignite.com/). We help researchers
at universities connect with companies interested in funding or
licensing their research. Currently, a vast majority of all
research goes uncommercialized. This includes everything from new
cancer therapies to energy storage improvements and other solutions
to universal problems. By connecting research to relevant
companies, we increase the probability that research will be
commercialized. We met while I was running a natural language
processing startup at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. Chase was working at Illinois Ventures, the venture
capital arm of the university. U of I conducted over $900M a year
worth of research, much of which was going uncommercialized.
Because university research portfolios are massive, diverse, and
highly complex, it's nearly impossible to figure out which
companies to partner with for which research. We realized that we
could apply NLP to the problem because it was written in scientific
text via patents and publications! We started by taking unpaid
pilots from universities in fall of 2019. Seven schools gave us two
pieces of research to match to industry. For 6 of the schools, we
completely failed and were unable to connect any of their research
to companies. But for one school, we managed to connect both of
their technologies to 5 companies each. We learned that patent
databases had company interest and activity in text format that
matched well to research publications. We also learned that
matching to patents was not quite enough, but if we also looked at
the competitors of those holding patents we were able to identify a
large enough top-of-funnel to find success on almost any topic. We
built our initial product and process around that approach.
Researchers upload scientific documents describing their research
and receive tailored lists of companies interested in that
research. Using natural language processing and graph theory, our
software analyzes the texts and matches their research to industry
activity consisting of nearly 3 billion relationships stored across
public and proprietary data. We've had success mainly leveraging
USPTO full-text and competitive intelligence data, with plans to
bring in European patents, SBIR, clinical trials, job postings,
corporate filings, press releases, social media, and any other text
that hints at what a corporation is interested in. What's unusual
is that we're the only solution that allows you to upload a piece
of research and receive a tailored list of companies and leads to
contact. We call this active marketing--helping researchers get in
touch with those who are most likely to move their research forward
--as opposed to a passive marketing approach, where researchers
upload their technologies in hopes of companies reaching out to
them (of course, they usually don't). Our approach results in an
average of 5 meetings with companies per scientific document vs our
competitors' passive approach which is lucky to result in 1
meeting. We currently make money by selling software and service
subscriptions to universities. Some examples: Professor Chou at
the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia uses our tool to identify
companies working on cancer therapies and connect with them about
potential research partnerships. Carnegie Mellon University uses
our software to market "moonshot" research topics to companies to
identify future funding partners. UC Davis uses our tool to
identify companies interested in licensing their intellectual
property. We're really excited to share FirstIgnite with this
community. We're open to all thoughts and ideas, we'd love to learn
about experiences you've had working on research projects, things
you know about university research or corporate R&D, or anything
else that can help us. Thank you!
Author : codypilot
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-08-13 13:51 UTC (9 hours ago)
| phreeza wrote:
| Have you considered marketing this to universities directly? I'm
| sure many universities these days have "knowledge
| transfer/commercialization" offices that would be interested in
| this.
| chasebonhag wrote:
| This is who we market it to! We're actually currently working
| with ~30 universities and national labs in the US. We work with
| the commercialization and corporate relations office (and a few
| deans of colleges as well).
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Another question. Have you heard of companies like Innocentive
| and HeroX? They seem to be at the other end of this, where
| companies put out a call for solutions and have a cash prize for
| them, as well as the opportunity for future partnerships.
|
| https://www.innocentive.com/#challenges
|
| https://www.herox.com/crowdsourcing-projects?from=home
| chasebonhag wrote:
| These are great. We knew about Halo.science but had not heard
| of these other two. I think it's a great model and these appear
| to be having good success. We really want to be involved in the
| transaction of scientific R&D projects, playing a larger role
| facilitating them, so will have to study these groups more.
| rojeee wrote:
| Great project! For anyone interested in the UK, there is a
| similar-ish (government funded) scheme called the "knowledge
| transfer partnership" [1], which connects academics and their
| research to businesses where it can be usefully applied.
|
| [1] https://www.ktp-uk.org
| chasebonhag wrote:
| Very cool. We'd love to connect with more UK universities and
| researchers as we currently only have US customers.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Is this US specific? (asking from the UK)
| pierre wrote:
| This is a great problem space!
|
| As mentioned by an other commenter, from the industry point of
| view it is quitte hard to find the good researchers.
|
| I worked on campus (both in Europe and US) for a Major insurance
| company trying to help with corporate R&D and there have been a
| lot of hurdle (see it as a list of pain points I faced when
| trying to collaborate with universities) :
|
| - Some researcher are a little too much focus on their area on
| expertise and will refuse to work on their research outside of
| the field they have in mind, because either "nobody need it for
| that, it's mean for [insert previous research project of
| researcher]". Ex: We need some really precise Geolocation to
| estimate the level of a river bed for flood estimation near
| industrial site, found the good lab / researcher (previous paper
| in the space solving similar problem albeit not for river), go to
| them ready to propose a grant to work on the topics, not
| interested to work on river.
|
| - Almost no researcher will want to work on a field that is view
| as 'solved', as they will not be able to publish. Ex: We are
| desesperate for better OCR tech, as we have an archive of
| hundreds of millions of document we need to make sense of. No
| machine vision / CS lab we approach want to do some research in
| this field as it is solved. Yet in reality the technology is
| generally not accurate enough on print character. Same story with
| Handwritten Character Recognition.
|
| - Some researcher will try to promote their implementation of
| their research, but generaly the quality of the implementation is
| far from what we expect to put in production, and generally have
| little UX / modern stack understanding, if you are lucky it's
| implemented in JAVA, but a lot of things are a python notebook,
| some R or MatLab. They will however not want to collaborate on a
| industry ready implementation and try to push their
| implementation they are in love with.
|
| If you were to fix this pain points, and provide a tool allowing
| for discovery this will really be great (and I will be happy to
| use it).
|
| However the really interesting collaboration emerge when you
| approach a lab for use of their research in a tangent field they
| didn't anticipate. I wonder if you could
| automate/accelerate/facilitate this with machine learning or
| something else.
| chasebonhag wrote:
| Wow! This is a great response. I'd love to find time for a
| chat, my email is chase@firstignite.com
| pedalpete wrote:
| A few people have mentioned marketing to companies who want the
| service, and I'll say, that's more inline with what I'm looking
| for.
|
| We come from a research organization (CSIRO) and are in the
| sleeptech space. We thought we were pretty well connected into
| research, but we're still spending quite a bit of time tracking
| down the right people and getting intros. Getting a project going
| is another step beyond that.
|
| This is in the situation where we know what research we want
| conducted. Do you see this fitting into your business model in
| the future? How would you see IP being managed in that
| environment?
| gyulai wrote:
| It might be worth considering a change of framing: Instead of
| helping researchers find a company to commercialize their
| research (solution looking for a problem), give companies a way
| to find researchers who can help them solve their problems
| (problem looking for a solution).
| james-bcn wrote:
| I agree. Phd students are often not particularly wealthy and
| may have to pay for this service out of their own money.
| Companies looking for specific expertise however are likely to
| have funds for it, and be more than willing to pay for a good
| service.
| chasebonhag wrote:
| Great point. The good news is we're offering our tool for
| free to PhD students right now as we work to get universities
| to cover sitewide licenses for faculty and students.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| My university at least had a commercialization office. I
| imagine that they are the ones paying for it in this model.
| chasebonhag wrote:
| Yes - the majority of our current customers include the tech
| transfer, corporate relations and VP of Research offices.
| codypilot wrote:
| Great insight! More than a change of framing it's also
| something we're beginning to explore and productize. At first,
| it was easy for us to view the tens of thousands of unlicensed
| university technologies as a problem, but now it seems to be
| more of a solution to the problem of corporate R&D not knowing
| who exactly they should be getting in touch with. Push vs pull
| if you will.
| chasebonhag wrote:
| Yes! I'm so glad you commented this. We actually ended up
| focusing on universities due to the pandemic last year and
| having to stay hyper focused. But, we're in process of
| preparing to launch our company need --> scientific expertise
| tool. This is a much larger market and we can't wait to kick
| things off.
| swandog46 wrote:
| It's not clear from your website how a PhD looking to connect
| with suitable industry opportunities would use the service?
| codypilot wrote:
| This is true, our typical user works within a tech transfer
| office or OVPR so much of our content is tailored to their
| needs. However, our approach of uploading research material and
| receiving lists of relevant companies is also effective at
| helping PhDs discover industry opportunities!
| bberenberg wrote:
| This sounds a lot like Niels Reimers as a service. Am I
| understanding this correctly?
| chasebonhag wrote:
| Wow! Yes, we're applying technology to help make it so everyone
| can be as effective as Niels!
| kayhi wrote:
| Researchers usually don't reach to companies since the university
| owns the IP and they have a licensing office that does this
| function. Is it a tool for them?
| codypilot wrote:
| For sure! Researchers can use the platform to find existing
| solutions or opportunities in the market. If there's a strong
| match then they could pursue a sponsored research agreement or
| simply get in touch for feedback and further opportunities.
| f6v wrote:
| Could you just index Google Scholar or ResearchGate profile?
| Also, why isn't ResearchGate doing something like this? They
| already have a job board.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Do you do anything to help the researchers make better marketing
| materials/give better pitches?
|
| Anecdotally, I was part of an accelerator where some participants
| were given the option of commercializing something the university
| had and researchers came and gave us pitches on things they
| thought should be commercialized.
|
| The pitches were terrible. About half the time nobody in the
| cohort had a grasp of what the IP was after the pitch had ended.
| Sometimes we were not sure of the industry.
| codypilot wrote:
| This is a great point. We realized early on that researchers
| present their research to industry as if they are giving a
| lecture to a group of peers; 45m of presenting without any
| response from the crowd. We try to work with our users to help
| them understand how to present their research in 5m or less in
| terms that industry will find interesting, but it's a constant
| battle. We're working on features to help with this!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-13 23:01 UTC)